This is an issue that I ran into when first using Ubuntu & Eclipse 3.2…

Eclipse 3.2 (Europa) can be found in the the Ubuntu repositories, using the package manager. Once it’s installed fire it up.

What I noticed was that Eclipse booted really slowly, and when using it some operations like opening a file to edit it lagged a fair bit. I did a little research and it turns out that this happens when Eclipse is using a non-Sun JRE.

So I needed to install the latest Sun JRE (currently Java 6 update 10). This can also be found in the Ubuntu repositories under “sun-java6-jre”. Once thats also installed you can change the default JRE used by Eclipse.

First of all we need to tell Ubuntu to use the Sun JRE so you will need to run the following command from the console

sudo update-alternatives --config java

This will display a list of installed JREs. You want to select (by entering the corresponding number) the JRE labeled:

/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java

Now you need to tell Eclipse to use the Sun JRE as well. So we need to edit the Eclipse java_home file by entering the following command into the console:

sudo gedit /etc/eclipse/java_home

This will open up a text editor, into which you need to add the following line at the top:

java-6-sun-1.6.0.10

Save the file & viola, your done! Fire up Eclipse and you should notice it is running a lot smoother. The same process applies for Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede), but if your on a lower end system I would stick using Eclipse 3.2 unless you need plugins that only run on 3.4 (e.g. Scala plugin).

This information was found by searching the Ubuntu Forums

Tags: console, eclipse, europa, ganymede, Ubuntu